In his lengthy and interesting blog post covering the future of Plasma, KDE's Aaron Seigo proposes Qt Quick and QML (a declarative language that embeds JavaScript) as replacement of the Graphics View architecture currently used by Plasma. This holds a promise of massive speedups and cheap effects as all paint operations become candidates for OpenGL acceleration, contrary to the aging Graphics View architecture that is still stuck with various inefficiencies caused by the underlying QPainter approach. Expressiveness and easy programmability of QML is a nice bonus, of course.

GNOME sppears to have a 50% larger use base right now compared to KDE according to these user-submitted survey results.

This despite the many years of continual sniping at KDE that some people have endlessly and uselessly been engaged in.

The design of KDE 4 was a very significant departure from KDE 3, and it took a fair effort to switch over, with a noteable drop in feature support during the transition. But now people may be able to see the benefits ... due to the cleaner design of KDE 4, we can now contemplate a significant change in the presentation layers, bringing with it the benefits of multi-threading and more extensive GPU acceleration, without serious impact on other parts of the desktop software.

Given that KDE can now move with the times WITHOUT significant regressions or disruptions gives the lie to your original claim.

So much so that one has to wonder at your motivations for making claims that are so obviously wrong.